A Piece Danced Alone

An open-ended series of solos passed from one performer to another, much like reflections in a mirror, Alexandra Bachzetsis’s newest work, “A Piece Danced Alone,” investigates ideas of originality and imitation—as well as the failure and transgression inherent in any interpretation. Through formal elements of repetition and mirroring, Bachzetsis’s solo performance for one person, which will serve as a score for subsequent dancers, will explore the effort to “try again”—or to “fail better,” as Samuel Beckett famously put it. Endlessly inventive, “A Piece Danced Alone” will take shape in three stages. First, it will investigate how much the repetition of movements, gestures, phrases, images, or words is essential for the production of meaning and the establishment of new cultural codes. This repetition will unfold in a double sense: on the one hand, it might be described as the intentional reoccurrence of a movement, its reproduction or imitation; on the other hand, its repetition might also stand for a rehearsal (and, in French, literally so: répétition). Second, Bachzetsis will address the failure of repetition, which is, by its very nature, inexact. As an act of interpretation and not merely a reproduction of an image, repeated movement cannot be identical to the original, because interpretation itself involves deviation. Finally, “A Piece Danced Alone” will explore the origins of contemporary icons and explore their transformation in different cultural, social, and political contextual spaces.